“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” said Andy Warhol. “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

With these words, Warhol could be the patron saint of the Frieze art fair, the four-day orgy of oligarchs that rolled into town last week. A surreal hybrid of Christie's and Walmart, staged inside a flimsy white tent in Regent's Park, the effect of Frieze is to remind you that everything is for sale. Touring the Masters fair at the weekend felt like wandering the halls of the British Museum or the National Gallery, only with an add-to-cart option. A pair of Mesopotamian stone duck weights from the second millennium BC? Yours for £100,000. Just add the £2.8m Lowry and £15m Picasso and proceed to checkout.

It is timely, then, that an exhibition celebrating a period of the greatest commercial cynicism in art should open across town this week – in the form of Pop Art Design at the Barbican. Injecting a world of super-saturated saccharine gloss into the gallery's concrete caves, it is full of the usual iconic images and objects from the 60s and 70s, beaming out rays of primary-coloured optimism from the walls. Now seared into our collective nostalgia by an arsenal of tea-towels and tote bags, T-shirts and mugs, the trajectory of pop art represents the ultimate circular route of self-cannibalisation. Its imagery was sampled from populist throwaway culture, elevated to the realm of museum walls, and is now reduced and recycled in the form of gift shop tat. All that's left is for someone to frame the keyring and continue the cycle.

What is different about this exhibition, the curators say, is that it pairs pop art with design for the first time. There is a Coke vending machine next to Warhol's spray-painted Coke bottles. There is a Saul Steinberg drawing, alongside the Eames chair he scribbled on. There are Eero Saarinen's Tulip chairs, and a painting by Patrick Caulfield that shows them in a domestic scene. But there is little differentiation between the objects produced for mass-manufacture, and the one-off artworks they inspired, between destined-for-gallery prototypes and popular printed ephemera. It is all presented as one hedonistic party of mutual sampling, a single visual and material culture spawned by the post-war euphoria of technology and mass-media, advertising and entertainment.

After Frieze, it is strange not to see price-tags, particularly when the Barbican gallery has never felt so much like a shop – a commercial feeling enhanced by the AOC's clever exhibition design, placing work behind the glazed walls of high-street windows. But the show's trade motives run deeper than this visual presentation alone.

The exhibition was originally put together by the Vitra Design Museum, staged in the furniture giant's own gallery in its factory campus in Weil-am-Rhein, before touring to Denmark's Louisiana Museum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm like a travelling trade show. It is not hard to see why Vitra might have had the idea.

George Nelson's Marshmallow sofa, right, designed in 1956 – a version of which sold for $60,000 at auction in 2007. Photograph: Gar Powell-Evans/Barbican

The 63-year-old Swiss company still produces a good deal of the furniture on show, and has made a global business empire out of being the officially licensed provider of many of what it terms the “20th-century design classics”. Aggressive lobbying by such heavyweight license-holders has seen design copyright law recently extended in the UK, to the designer's lifetime plus 70 years – preventing the production of Eames replicas, for example, until around 2060. And now, what better way to add value to the protected brands than showing their chairs alongside Rauschenberg and Warhol, Paolozzi and Lichtenstein?

It is an association that seems to be having the desired effect. As the collector's market for design classics grows, furniture pieces are increasingly commanding art-world price tags. An early version of George Nelson's Marshmallow sofa, designed in 1956, sold for $60,000 at auction in 2007. At the sale of Yves Saint Laurent's private collection in 2009, a Dragons armchair by Eileen Gray went for $28m. Living designers are getting in on the act too: a Zaha Hadid table was recently auctioned in New York for $269,000.

But is the conflation of art and design, and the artificially inflated prices of licensed “originals”, something we should be celebrating?

Charles and Ray Eames, whose work features in the Barbican show, were adamant that their designs were intended to be for everyone, not for the museum pedestal: “We wanted to make the best for the most for the least,” said Charles, insisting that the work had nothing to do with art, even their animations and film work. “We’ve never used film as an artform,” he said, “just as a tool to inform our design work.”

It is something that might be useful to remind those organising the lavish world of design fairs, like PAD London, which popped up in Mayfair's Berkley Square last week. Billed as a “boutique fair for design,” to coincide with the descent of the world's collectors for Frieze, it claimed to offer “museum-quality” works “presented in a sophisticated setting”. In reality, it was another series of trade-show booths in a big tent, showcasing a perversion of design's problem-solving discipline, in a precise inversion of the Eames mantra: making for the least, and selling it for the most.